Would it be unthinkable that I should stay in the saddle however much the facts bucked?

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Speaking

As a public speaker, Kathryn Schulz has an uncanny knack for making her audience laugh while also making them think. Her message about the importance of embracing our innate human fallibility has inspired audiences of every kind, from CEOs to college students, doctors to educators, engineers to religious leaders. Her talks have received rave reviews from her hosts, including PopTech 2010, the Royal Society of the Arts in London, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, and many more. She is available to speak on every aspect of error, including:

The origins of error: how our senses, our minds, and our society can mislead us, and how we can learn to anticipate and prevent those mistakes

Why most of us have such negative feelings about wrongness, and how that attitude affects the way we educate our kids, run our companies, and resolve our conflicts -- whether with family members, coworkers, neighbors, or nations

How embracing error is, paradoxically, the best way to prevent mistakes -- including in high-stakes domains where errors can be financially, materially, emotionally or physically costly

Why error is such a crucial engine of innovation, and how accepting and understanding our fallibility can make us more creative, more empathetic, and more forgiving, toward ourselves as well as toward other people

Kathryn's presentations generally include lively audiovisual materials, and she tailors each talk to the needs and interests of her audience.

Smoking is seriously bad for your health. Smokers die an average of 14 years earlier than nonsmokers, from causes ranging from lung cancer to heart attacks; tobacco-related diseases are the leading cause of premature death in developed nations. Many of these deleterious effects have been known for over a century – and yet, until the 1960s, smoking was routinely advertised as good for you, and doctors were recruited to champion the health benefits of smoking. Lucky Strike and Camel both advertised themselves as doctor-recommended, and the Journal of the American Medical Association ran cigarette ads until the 1950s. In fact, advertising the health benefits of smoking was so common that at least one brand went on the counterattack: Old Gold billed itself as “a treat, not a treatment.” Today all tobacco products sold in the United States (and much of the rest of the world) are required to carry a warning about the health risks of smoking.